When I woke up I was in a pitch-dark place, on my side, a fetus in what I soon realized was the cramped metal womb of an automobile trunk. The car was jostling along a gravel road-I could hear the rocks kicking up under the car and against the fenders.
I had barely figured this out when the car rolled to a stop. I felt around for something, for anything, maybe a tire iron, but the lid of the trunk lifted and the moonlight was so bright I squinted as Big George McCracken looked in at me with a sneer of a smile. Next to him was a dark-haired, hook-nosed, bull-necked tough in a dark suit and a tie. He looked familiar, but in my dazed condition, I couldn’t place him.
“Git ’im outa there, wouldja, Carlos?”
Carlos.
Last year at Dandy Phil Kastel’s warehouse, this short, muscular hood had been uncrating slot machines, and doing Kastel’s bidding.
Carlos’s big hands grabbed on to my suit coat and he hauled me out of the trunk like a sack of grain. My feet tried to keep my body upright, but my knees wobbled. Carlos held on to me by the waist and dragged me along.
The car, I noted for no good reason, was a black Studebaker two-door coupe. It had pulled up on the grass incline with perhaps a dozen other vehicles, ranging from new sedans to beat-up pickup trucks, in front of a rambling ramshackle oversize shed of a building alive with lights and laughter and honky-tonk piano; a crude wood- burned sign sat on two legs in the unmowed yard: WILLSWOOD TAVERN. Silhouetted behind the gray, unpainted wooden frame structure, with its split-log shingles, loomed the ghostly, foreboding shapes of a swamp.
They dragged me behind the building; through open windows, I glimpsed a burly bartender with no apron dispensing sweaty bottles of beer, drunken men dancing with loose women, long picnic-type tables where spaghetti and oysters and crawfish were being chowed down by a rowdy clientele, smaller tables where men were playing cards with piles of cash on the table.
Behind the building, across a short yard with tall unmowed grass, the darkness of the swamp beckoned me to make a break for it. Whatever dangers lurked there, they were surely preferable to the certainty of what faced me with Big George and Carlos.
But my muscles weren’t working yet; my brain barely was.
McCracken opened a door, and Carlos pushed me through. I stumbled into a dark room and rolled on a hard dirt floor, bumping up against a wooden chair. A door slammed, and a cone of light clicked on from a hanging lamp, and I was a huddled shape in the spotlight.
“Put ’im in the chair, Carlos.”
The big hands were on me again, and I was hoisted off the floor and slammed into the wooden chair. Carlos got around behind me and yanked my arms behind me and rope looped around my wrists and around through the rungs of the chair. I could feel him knotting them, tying me into the chair; at least the hemp wasn’t so tight as to cut off the circulation. Thank God for small favors.
It was a small supply room-shelves of canned goods, stacked cartons of bottled beer; a big gray metal washer tub was shoved against the slats of one wall.
“I can handle this by myself,” McCracken said to Carlos.
“Thanks,” Carlos said. “No good de boss not bein’ ’round on Sat’dy night.”
The bullnecked hood-and apparent proprietor of the Willswood Tavern-opened a door that must have led into the kitchen, because the pungent aroma of tomato sauce filled the room. Dishes and kettles clattered.
“You get tired, George my fren’,” Carlos said, “jus’ let me know. I send Bucky Boy back.”
Then it was just me and McCracken.
He took off his suitcoat and rested it on the stacked beer cartons. A.38 revolver was shoulder-holstered under his left arm. He unbuttoned his cuffs and rolled up his sleeves. Then he plucked something off a shelf-he was outside the cone of light, and I couldn’t make out what it was-and stepped into the light, right in front of me, the hand with the object, whatever it was, behind his back.
His battered fighter’s mug worked up a smile. “We already tossed your hotel room, didn’t find ’em. Didn’t find ’em in your car, neither….”
The noise of drunken merriment, from out in the saloon, leached through the wooden walls.
“I don’t have the goddamn bullets,” I said.
“Sure you do. You said you did. I heard ya tell Seymour and Dickie.”
“I was bluffing.”
He frowned; thinking was an effort. “Bluffin’?”
“There
“Bullshit.”
“It’s the truth, goddamnit! George, listen to me-I knew those sons of bitches rooked Mrs. Long outa the ‘dee-duct box’ money. Asking around, I figured out Carl Weiss just punched Huey, and set you guys off!”
“I’ll ask ya again,” he said, and his hand came out from behind his back.
A rubber hose.
“Please don’t,” I said. In Chicago, it was called getting fed the goldfish; and it was a meal I’d been served before.
It hadn’t agreed with me.
“George, goddamnit, I’m telling you the truth….”
The hose swished through the air and whacked into my left forearm; the sting was followed by a deep ache.
“I want those bullets, Heller. Where
It swished again, and again, and each time I cried out, but nobody out there having fun could hear me, and the sting would be followed by the ache, and he kept questioning me and I kept telling him I didn’t have the goddamn bullets and he moved on to my right arm and then my thighs and my calves and shins and by that time I had stopped yelling and started whimpering and then I stopped whimpering and started crying my fucking eyes out, and then, thank God, I passed out.
Somebody threw water in my face and I came out of it, coughing, choking, sputtering, spitting, not knowing whether I’d been out a minute or an hour or a week; but the pain was living agony and I began to scream and McCracken slipped a hand over my mouth and I screamed into it.
The sound of drunken revelry continued from the next room.
McCracken took his hand away from my face. “Keep your voice down, Heller, or you get the next one in the jewels.”
And he whapped me on the thigh, alongside my balls, and the pain shot through me like an arrow, but I clenched my teeth. Didn’t scream. Just moaned.
A hillbilly scarecrow in coveralls and no shirt on his hairless sunken chest stepped into the shaft of light. He had an awful, crooked, bucktooth smile that was black and yellow and green-everything but white; his eyes were large and yellow and his nose was straight and pointed, like a bee stinger. His sunken cheeks were stubbly, but his chin was nowhere in sight; his Adam’s apple was prominent and bobbed as he laughed, which he was doing right now, watching me suffering in my chair.
“This is Bucky Boy,” McCracken said. “Bucky Boy’s gonna he’p me out.”
“I’m the fella ’round here what makes the Yankee gumbo!” Bucky Boy chortled. He kicked the big gray washer tub. “Mix ’er up in there, I do.”
McCracken folded his arms; the rubber hose hung limply, but threateningly, from his right hand. “Why don’t ya ask Bucky Boy what Yankee gumbo is?”
But I didn’t have to.
“I dump me a Yankee in this here tub,” he said, and kicked it again, and laughed idiotically, deep in his throat, making his Adam’s apple bob some more, “and then I pours in
Leaving a partly decomposed, liquefied corpse….
McCracken picked up the recipe from there: “Before long, all we got to do is pour that fool Yankee into the swamp.”
Ingenious way to dispose of a corpse; send it flowing into a waterway.
